Leading article: Islands of uncertainty in need of a new status

Robin Cook does not much resemble Charles de Gaulle. But the Foreign Secretary has now set out to do something the French president accomplished a generation ago: dismantle an empire. Defeat in the battle for Algiers pushed the French to wrap up their African presence, then, with impeccable logic, to make the citizens of what remained of non-metropolitan France full citizens of France. The inhabitants of Guadeloupe and Martinique do not - like the inhabitants of Pitcairn or St Helena - have an indeterminate colonial relationship with the motherland; they belong to it, vote in its elections and possess its civic rights.

The volcanic eruptions on Montserrat are not to be compared with events in Algeria, of course, yet their outcome ought to be the same: a final reckoning for the fag-end of empire. There is no point pretending that the process is going to be quick and surgical - the specific circumstances, populations and cultures of the dependent territories forbid that. There is no point in concealing that there are political pitfalls in resolving the status of Gibraltar or the Falklands. But Labour, prodded by events in the Caribbean, ought to be able to do what the Tories could not, through political cowardice - which is to recognise that this country cannot accomplish modernisation, cannot look the 21st century full in the face, without regularising the position of this rag-bag of distant islands.

Clare Short's deputy, George Foulkes, sets out for the West Indies at the weekend in what looks unmistakably like an exercise of stable-door closing. Volcanic eruptions permitting, the situation on the island of Montserrat is now settling down and - paradoxically - the island may now become a legitimate object of attention for the Department for International Development. A merit of the past week's event has been to involve the Foreign Office and No 10 - where eventually big decisions about the dependent territories will have to be taken.

What these events have exposed is Whitehall's myopia about those faraway islands and their lack of a "parent" or sponsor at court. It was a gap, to be sure, all too evident before the Falklands episode in 1982, and shines through the paragraphs of the Franks report on the circumstances leading up to the Argentine invasion. It must not happen again, so one necessary product of Mr Cook's review has to be the identification of a fixed Whitehall address for these islands.

They are not, of course, "foreign", just as the Channel Islands are not "British". The Foreign Office will need to stay in close contact with the Home Office and other departments, for example consulting the latter's archives. They will show, among other things, just how variable has been the status of the United Kingdom's close-to islands: Jersey, Guernsey, Heligoland (British for a decade after the First World War), Rockall, St Kilda (once evacuated on official orders), and Man. Constitutional lawyers and Conservative MPs have been remarkably happy with the utterly anomalous position of Sark within these sceptr'd isles; why shouldn't a similar leeway be extended to the Turks and Caicos? We know from the public record how in the early Sixties ministers were prepared to give serious consideration to resolving problems with Malta by giving the Maltese a parliamentary vote and absorbing their islands into the United Kingdom - something the then Maltese government was keen on. Is such a solution so outlandish, now, for St Helena?

The bureaucratic mind always seeks uniform solutions. Fascinating proposals have been in made, in the past, for a new British Atlantic Territory status to include all the islands in, or in waters contiguous to, that ocean. But these turn out to be too different, too defined by their different histories. Mr Cook will need to play the tailor and devise plans for each. Take the Falklands. Political realists will say that years still have to pass before the disposition of the archipelago can sensibly be discussed, let alone determined; political cynics will observe how political, let alone economic, development south of the Rio Grande still seems to defy all the trajectories and certain upwards movements prepared and predicted by Rand Institute Hegelians. Yet neither point absolves the Foreign Secretary from seeking to regularise the islands' status, let alone the political identity of their inhabitants.

Or Gibraltar, whose citizens possess British passports and sport GB stickers on their cars. Determining the rock's future is a test, to be sure, as much of the political maturity of Spain's political class, media and people as of British willingness to grasp a nettle. Here is a test, too, of the capacity of the European Union to engage with the hard world of power plays and national symbolism as opposed to that of butter mountains and money banks. Or Pitcairn - surely to be placed under the protection of Australia or New Zealand, like South Pacific territories before. Or Diego Garcia or Ascension (cede their sovereignties to the United States?).

As for Montserrat, the Caribbean has been hospitable enough to other tiny inhabited islands fashioning themselves, after colonialism, as statelets or de facto American dependencies. The process is rough and ready. It will, necessarily, involve balancing the inhabitants' declared wishes with the reality principle and British metropolitan interests. There is no single superior principle (such as what islanders want) that has to prevail at all costs. A priority in British foreign policy has to be to accelerate the business of cutting the suit according to what cloth is available to a middle-ranking European power which lives by commerce and finance. Britain still spends far too much in maintaining a pretentious military and diplomatic profile. Resolving the future of the dependent territories is an essential part of this adjustment.